


vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

by orphan_account



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Color Blindness, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurts So Good, M/M, To Be Edited, Tropes, finished work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 20:23:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3742444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Playing around with my favorite trope: When you meet your soulmate, the world begins to have color. Until then, everything is gray. And that's how you know.</p><p>  <i>It was quite strange, what Charles lost. What Erik took with him. It began in the most benign way; he lost the color brown.</i></p><p>  <b>ETA: FINISHED.</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

**Author's Note:**

> It's finished! To everyone who kept poking me on the series page and Tumblr, you can quit now. :D 
> 
> The poem referenced is Catullus 85, and it's famous. Title is from Catullus 5, which is also famous (translates to, "Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love"). It's the one about a zillion kisses and dying. What, that isn't specific enough?

The first time they met, it was dark, and to their eyes, the world was greyscale. There were rather more pressing matters, as well—the fact that Erik was attempting to, well, destroy a pleasure barge being one of the major ones, yes.

It wasn’t until later—when they were inside, drying off, Erik taken by Moira for “questioning” on why exactly he was attempting to destroy a boat—that Charles noticed.

The towel he was wrapped in was…well, he didn’t have a name for it, properly. He’d heard of the color spectrum, was aware of wavelengths and frequencies and how light scattered, but he didn’t have a word for this color. It was pleasing to the eye, though. A further examination of the towel’s tag told him it was maroon. A darkish, purplish red, then. Charles had never known purple and he’d never known red. It was one of the cons of not finding his Half at a young age: conceptual knowledge of colors.

The stone and steel of the room were likely shades of grey; his skin was a pale tan, and now Charles really was interested, because of all the people whose minds he’d glanced off of, none of them had been paired with their Half. None of them knew color, because it was statistically unlikely for them to have found that one person in…five billion, he guessed roughly, that would make them see.

He’d only really met one new person in the last hour or so, though, and a quick telepathic read of the ship confirmed that, yes, it was indeed this…metallokinetic, and he didn’t seem at all pleased.

* * *

Initially, that was. Not two games of chess later, Erik (Erik, he rolled the name around mentally) tumbled him into bed (of course that would never have happened except by mutual agreement) and sex with Erik was vastly different from the coeds he’d picked up with his lines about groovy mutations, it was color and the headboard bending to wrap around his wrists and the connection, it was overwhelming. He didn’t know how Erik could feel so strongly, God.

Everything they taught you in grade school, with the allegories and the fairy tales, suggested that when you met your Half, you’d think they were made for you. 

Charles had not ever, in his strangest imaginings, pictured Erik.

* * *

When Raven ran up to him in tears, saying, “Your eyes are blue, Charles, they’re blue, I’m blue, oh, God—,” Charles had the decency not to ask until she’d finished crying.

“Who?” he prodded gently, curled on a too-small sofa in his quarters at the so-called CIA "Mutant Branch.”

She simply shook her head into the general vicinity of his armpit, where she’d slid once she sat down, and murmured, “How did you and Erik deal with this? You met and then suddenly you were Mommy and Daddy Mutant.”

Charles refrained from asking which of them was which, because he had a sneaking suspicion he did not want the answer to that question. Rather, he answered simply, “Erik and I…took it for what it is, quite literally, at the start. Simply a biological compatibility.”

“And then you had sex,” Raven said thickly.

“Yes,” Charles replied tightly. “Which you don’t have to.”

“You liked it.”

Charles chuckled, jostling Raven’s head about slightly. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, but there is in fact more to Erik than his, er, prowess in sexual matters.” He stroked her hair, red in contrast to her blue skin and white robe, and asked again, more delicately, “Who?”

“The scientist with the foot thing…Hank was his name. Hank.” Her thoughts were colored with puzzlement, and Charles didn’t have to extend his ability at all to pick up on the waves of frustration rolling off of his sister. “What do I do?” she grumbled finally. “O Wise One.”

He played idly with a stray lock of her hair. “Well, first I’d suggest ceasing the hysterics and actually having a chat with the poor man—“

Erik chose that moment to unlock the door to the apartment and slide in, a slight smile curving his lips as his eyes lit on Charles, curled up on the couch with his foster sister. Charles didn’t notice, until Raven did, that all the tension went out of Charles’s body as he smiled back and breathed a, “Welcome home, Erik.”

When Erik was safely out of earshot, though, Raven muttered, “You two are disgusting.”

* * *

It was quite strange, what Charles lost. What Erik took with him. It began in the most benign way; he lost the color brown.

Suddenly, he couldn’t quite recall the shade of Erik’s hair. He knew it was a chestnut mixed with the tang of metal, an amalgamation of brown and grey. The color leached out of the hardwood floor, the leather belt tossed carelessly on a rug (it was still _red_ ), the frame of the bed, still rumpled from where they last—

Charles had not slept in their bed since Cuba.

(His chair was the one thing that remained when all was said and done. It was grey. It had always been grey.)

Charles’s beautiful reds and blues and greens faded from his world. 

He would have hoped, had he hoped, that with the vibrant colors, the abiding _pain_ would dull. He still _felt_ , though, truly and madly. Long after his legs had numbed, the throbbing behind his chest remained. He was Catullus, and his Lesbia was so far from him; he hated, he loved. He would have pried open his chest and bled himself if he had believed for a moment it would help.

The volume of Latin poetry Erik left dog-eared on the nightstand once had a blue cover. This was the only of Erik’s possessions which Charles could bear to touch. He spent time with it, contemplating _odi et amo._ His fingers brushed over a page that was once tinged yellow, tracing the path of black words over a greyed-out background.

When news came over one of the three broadcast networks of Kennedy’s assassination, the television and all that it showed was grey. All the color had faded from the world again, and Charles was left with the mere memory of an entire spectrum. 

The bullet curved, they said, and a mutant by the name of Erik Lehnsherr was implicated in the untimely death of the first Catholic president of the United States.

Suddenly, _odi et amo_ had a new dimension. 

Erik Lehnsherr was incarcerated, of course. The man who once flooded Charles’s world with rage and serenity was now in a cell beneath the most secure building on the planet, and Charles truly believed he belonged there. Erik had hurt so many people. Charles was one man in a vast sea of victims.

The serum took away his powers, gave him back his legs. It was not until years later that he rediscovered an existence with purpose; he languished in his mansion with Hank and Catullus, and for so long, this was enough. This greyscale world took so much getting used to.

* * *

The End of Days came much more quickly than Charles could ever have anticipated. 

Scott, Jean, Kurt—all dead. There were so many others. So much death. 

It could not have compared to the destruction wreaked by the Sentinel program.

At the end of all things, Charles was reunited with Erik. Once again, they shared a purpose. The world and everything in it remained covered in shades of grey, even as Kate Pryde knelt, wounded, over the immobile form of Logan. They had faith they could change this.

The Sentinels stormed the base. Ororo fell first, and then, one by one, mutants were picked off like so many flies on a summer day. Charles knew, when the first clangs of metal on metal struck, that Erik was planning to martyr himself. He was building a barricade, buying Kate and Logan and Charles as much time as he could. 

It had been so many years, so many _decades_ , and suddenly the dull ache behind Charles’s chest ripped into life, spilling into love and fear. The world bled around the edges, color tingeing the corners of Charles’s vision. His breath caught behind his ribs, a peculiar resistance—it felt like a sob, but that wasn’t it.

An instant later, Erik spilled through a portal in the door, falling through his metal barricade and into the final safe place. It startled Kate and her watcher; Charles had eyes only for Erik. Of course—he’d only ever had eyes for Erik.

The sound of imminent destruction grew louder outside the temple; Erik, wounded badly, slumped against the wall. As the Sentinels began to break the barrier, Erik took Charles’s hand, whispering about all the years they had spent fighting, a futile war, a meaningless campaign.

“To have a precious few of them back,” Erik murmured, and Charles squeezed his hand, because he knew, he _knew_ , that just as suddenly as the color had flooded back into his world, it had flooded Erik’s, and Charles’s heart broke for the last time, clutching Erik’s hand as he thought, as hard as he’d ever projected to Erik, _Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._

Erik’s lips moved with the familiar words. _I hate you and love you. Why do I do this, you may ask. I know not; I feel it happen, and I am tormented._

His eyes were so beautiful, their blue-grey not the least faded with age, and Charles felt tears rush free as the world went white. 

* * *

Logan remembered, and Charles felt nothing but the sense that he was missing something _important_.

The next time the X-Men met up with the Brotherhood, Erik’s eyes were blue-grey.

 


End file.
